2009 is almost half over and I thought it would be a good time to post an update on what we, your board of directors are doing to keep your cemetery maintained. Over the years sense the “93 Flood” dug the Blue Hole in the center of the cemetery the bank of the lake has began to show erosion. The board decided to repair the bank around the lake with rock so that the wind erosion doesn’t cause the bank to erode in the future. We contracted to start the work this spring but the weather hasn’t allowed us to get much done to date.

If you are looking at this you may have checked the other pages of our web page. I hope to keep you up dated on the activities of the cemetery through the use of the web page. I have updated a database of the obituaries of our love ones buried in the cemetery and will post the data base in the future. I don’t have obituaries covering many of the people buried before 1980 because no one saved them to the cemetery records. If you happen to have an obituary of your love one and would like to share it with me I will be glad to add it to the database. You can either send me a copy to, Stephen Shirley, 10081 Shirley Cir., Hardin Mo. 64035, or email it to me at
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. Also if you have any suggestions as to how I can improve the web page please email you ideas.

As most of you know, maintaining a cemetery is like keeping up your house, there is always something to do and a tight budget to do it with. The cemetery board set up a cemetery improvement fund in 2006. This will be a method for you to ear mark your gift to go toward improvement and repair. The first project covered by the improvement fund is the work of repairing and resetting the old sandstone tombstones in the south section. We need to reset 300+ stones, which were damaged by the “93 Flood” in this section. When we did this work after the flood, stones were temporarily set in the ground without new bases because we were working at rebuilding the cemetery as quickly as we could. Over the last 15 years the stones started leaning, so we decided to start this improvement project. We are still working on this project but have completed repairing about 75% of these stones involved in this project. As most of you know this is the original part of the cemetery and date back to the early 1800’s.

As you might guess the expenses of mowing and repair keep going up. You can mail gifts to the Hardin Cemetery, 10081 Shirley Cir., Hardin, MO 64035. Take a look at the newsletter that is posted on this web page. It will explain in more detail the different ways you can make a donation to the cemetery.

I want to thank all of you who have made donations to the cemetery over the years. These donations helped us rebuild and improve the cemetery.